Dave’s Detours: Sitka Sedge
By Dave Powell
For the TODAY
Sitka Sedge is located about a mile south of Whalen Island and three miles north of Pacific City/Cape Kiwanda. Sitka Sedge is classified as a state natural area, a designation for protecting outstanding or important portions of Oregon's ecosystems. I really like the fact that the parking lot holds just 20 to 25 cars, and the trails seem empty — so more back to nature.
It has no cell phone service — no one to bother you while you enjoy the great outdoors.
It is hard to call this a detour anymore. The new Oregon Coast Trail (OCT) maps released this spring put Sitka Sedge now on the Trail. The previous OCT maps were done before Sitka Sedge became a state park in 2018. Still, Sitka Sedge has more than the trail to the Ocean. AllTrails has listed a 3.5-mile hike (basically the outside perimeter) including the estuary viewpoint (map #1) re-opened when Trailkeepers of Oregon removed fallen trees this spring.
I must be getting old. My memory isn’t firing on all cylinders. I thought to do an article on Gerdemann’s rhododendrons in Yachats followed by Sitka Sedge roses in bloom the next week. Oops, longer time between blooms. And they are old roses with only five double-lobed petals and one bloom before they grow hips. I could blame COVID: after all, it threw off the routine last year. Or I could blame age dilation. When you are one year old, another year is the same as your entire life; if you’re 10 years old, it’s 10 percent; at 50 it’s two percent; and at my age... That is why eventually years blur into each other. Or the blame is what Ray Thomas (of the Moody Blues) sang in “The Troubles of Memories:” “The trouble with memories, they’re never where you leave them. The trouble with memories, they change with the years. ... As time goes by, leaves start to fall. We try to remember, did it happen at all?”
Probably it’s just wish fulfillment — I just want them to bloom and am impatient! They only bloom once a year and I don’t want to miss them. Like rabbits (and there are some in Sitka Sedge), I am drawn to roses.
Nearly 35 years ago I worked with and understood roses. I was in Louisville, Kentucky. I worked for Monte Justice two summers in personal rose gardens. Monte knew roses. Each day before we headed out, we got our supplies from his garage — and in it there were his 20-plus award boards. Each year had a piece of plywood with 20 to 40 ribbons from the state fair (and I thought Kentucky was a commonwealth). Almost all the ribbons were blue, and almost every year’s award board had “Queen of the Show” — best rose for the state! Virtually all the winners at the Kentucky State Fair the two years I worked with him were Monte’s customers. One hint I will pass on, to get some extra shine on the leaves gently rub on facial oil, especially easy if you have oily skin.
To find the roses is easy. Enter the park, and at the kiosk take the trail — you are on the Beltz Dike Trail. On the estuary side of the Beltz Dike trail you will notice Salal bushes — they started blooming about two weeks ago. The roses start at near the bend, where trail shifts from west to north.
So, go out and enjoy the five-petaled ancestors of roses of my and my wife’s birthyears Chrysler Imperial (1953 All American Rose), Mojave (1954 All American Rose). They do not have as many petals, but the odor is unmistakable — as Shakespeare wrote: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Final Tally:
If you walk the 3.5-mile hike around the perimeter of the park listed by AllTrails, and then still head out to the ocean to continue the OCT you have added about three miles, since Beltz Dike is now OCT.